analogwzrd

Russ Roberts did a good interview on EconTalk with Christy Ford Chapin, who wrote a book about the history of health insurance in the US and pointed several fingers at the AMA for preventing any progress or innovation in the healthcare industry.

https://www.econtalk.org/christy-ford-chapin-on-the-evolutio...

Techne Solutions is a small, embedded software and hardware design firm located in Boulder, CO. I specialize in IoT and Industrial IoT prototyping, but can design for all kinds of applications.

Location: Boulder, CO

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No, but travel to onsite is welcome

Technologies: IoT, IIoT, embedded software (mostly bare-metal), circuit board design for microcontrollers/FPGAs, RF testing background

Resume/CV: www.technesolutionsllc.com

Email: james@technesolutionsllc.com

SEEKING WORK | Denver, CO | Remote is possible

Techne Solutions is an engineering design and consulting firm that I recently started with a good friend and former co-worker. My background is in embedded hardware/software, PCB design, and test engineering. My business partner is a mechanical engineer focusing on advanced manufacturing (both additive and subtractive). Together, we're helping other small to medium size businesses prototype new hardware and products. There's more info on the "Team" section of our webpage.

Please check out our website(below) and don't hesitate to get in touch if we could be of any help!

Website: www.technesolutionsllc.com E-mail: james@technesolutionsllc.com

SEEKING WORK Location: Denver/Boulder, CO Remote Possible: YES

Techne Solutions is an engineering design and consulting firm that I recently started with a good friend and former co-worker. My background is in embedded hardware/software, PCB design, and test engineering. My business partner is a mechanical engineer focusing on advanced manufacturing (both additive and subtractive). Together, we're helping other small to medium size businesses prototype new hardware and products. There's more info on the "Team" section of our webpage.

Please check out our website(below) and don't hesitate to get in touch if we could be of any help!

Website: www.technesolutionsllc.com E-mail: james@technesolutionsllc.com

SEEKING WORK | Denver, CO | Remote OK

I recently started a small engineering design and consulting firm with my business partner. My background is in hardware(printed circuit board) and software engineering for embedded systems as well as test and systems engineering. My business partner is a mechanical engineer specializing in additive manufacturing and systems analysis.

I've designed boards for SoCs(FPGAs) as well as microcontrollers and develop low-level (no OS) software for the hardware I've designed.

We're only a couple of months old and we're building our network of customers.

Check out our website for more information and please get in touch with us if you have any questions (or feedback!)

http://www.technesolutionsllc.com

E-mail: james@technesolutionsllc.com

This little video of a an 80's desk versus a contemporary one has been bouncing around Twitter today...it's a really great visual showing how apps have slowly been replacing everything that used to clutter a desk.

https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1181708302943539200?...

If they're serious about decreasing the importance of shareholder value, then they'll re-design executive and management compensation to be tied less to the company stock price.

This was my exact path. For the longest time, the goal was to become gainfully employed as an engineer. Achieving your primary goals seems to be a lot like meeting your heros - you'll always be disappointed. Once I had the job, then I had to figure out how to keep it from completely absorbing me.

Most of the stages you mentioned above use an external criteria for success and for motivation. If that's the only kind of system you're familiar with, then you probably hadn't had the chance to stop and think "Does doing this make me happy?" because in those systems that question is irrelevant. You do what needs to be done to achieve the grade/rating/performance review and then ask what hoop you need to jump through next.

It seems the people that build truly rewarding careers are generally more internally motivated and because they have a better idea of who they are and what drives and motivates them are in a better position to to say "no" to things.

I think it's a mistake to look for leaders in our elected officials. In general, politicians poll their constituents and their platform changes to mirror what their constituents want in order to continue being re-elected. Sometimes whenever a politician "flip flops" it's because they're changing their position to better align with their constituents.

But this also means that public policy lags public opinion. If you want new (govenrment) solutions, you have to change public opinion first.

Change the public opinion and the politicians will follow but I wouldn't expect them to take the lead.

I've always considered sci-fi to be a genre where authors re-imagine how society works or what it means to be human - sometimes highlighted by comparisons to aliens and their societies, transplanting a culture to a new environment, or imagining the effect advancing technology. I think Heinlein did a pretty good job of those things. I agree it wasn't always well done though.

I do wish his plot lines flowed better. They sometimes make quick jumps as if he was in a hurry or didn't want to take the time to make events more fluid.

Heinlein was definitely weird, but he wrote science fiction. You should sort of expect it to stretch the Overton Window.

I'm not 100% sure that you read the whole article. There's absolutely a reason given why per student expense wasn't considered: "intentions to raise performance are not the same as raising performance." That's a good argument for expenditures not to be included regardless of the impact it may have. Why use a questionable proxy when you could find better ways of actually measuring performance?

The "high-tax, high-spending progressive utopias" remark was mirroring the Paul Krugman op-ed that was mentioned in the introduction to the article.

I'm not exactly sure where they draw the lines...but the "Accelerate" picture on the website for that department at UAB is a picture of the Innovation Depot.

That department might just be the university side of the accelerator.

I couldn't give you a list of examples off the top of my head, but I do know that people are aware of this problem and one of the more prominent solutions is to attach a start-up accelerator to the university.

The example I know of is the Innovation Deport in Birmingham, AL (my hometown) being attached to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The university does a lot of medical research and from what I hear, the Innovation Depot is trying to establish itself as the go-to place for professors to take their patents and provide business/engineering/manufacturing expertise.

https://innovationdepot.org/

I think the author left out the other side of the argument...maybe the Wharton professor didn't in the original presentation of the idea.

How does the company treat the employee? I've found that the employee will generally try to mirror how the company treats them. If they feel the company is taking advantage of them, then they might start acting like a Taker just to balance out the relationship.

If they freely give to the company, and the company gives back, then that could start a positive feedback loop.

Sometimes, the company is structured so that the company can't give back, i.e. rigid HR policies about raises/promotions that limit a meritocracy. If the opportunity cost of switching company's is higher, then the employee is probably going to milking the company for everything it's worth to try to even out the relationship.

Unfortunately, you could argue that it's well known because it's so easy to believe that it's being used as an instruction manual.

Alternate (probably American title) I remember from high school is The Gods Will Have Blood

True. There are several companies that are infamous for how terrible their datasheets are. Especially as a hobbyist it can be important to pick companies that provide good documentation because you don't have the leverage of saying you work for a large company that's going to buy 1000s of their parts.

Asking questions on the manufacturer's forum is useful to because you can typically get an application engineer to respond.

If the modules are made by good manufacturers, then they'll have datasheets that have ample explanation of how to use the module. The easier the manufacturer makes it to use their device, the more likely someone's going to buy it afterall.

Look through the datasheet and there should be several example application circuits. The datasheet will usually include descriptions about each pin of the module. If you need to use external components to "set" the pins of the module in some way, the datasheet will usually have some equations about how to calculate the correct value and maybe an explanation of where that equation came from. It'll also list maximum, minimum, and typical drive(voltage or current) levels for the pins. When you see the datasheet mention a term you don't know, spend a few minutes looking it up. A few used to describe module pins that jump to mind are "open drain" and "open collector" - those terms tell you a lot about what components you might want to add externally to the pin.

Make sure you understand Ohm's law and the concept of a pull-up or pull-down resistor and when to use them. Also, what a decoupling capacitor does. When you see a capacitor tied to a module pin, can you tell if it's acting like a filter or a charge reservoir.

Keep playing around with it and you'll eventually build up a lot of knowledge and intuition about how to connect everything. And other people have mentioned a lot of great books to use as resources as well.

My team hosts a meeting every two weeks to talk about staffing - who's overworked and why. We also discuss what problems we're dealing with and solutions we've found for those problems...so the group's knowledge grows, but not in an official, legible way. It's still tribal knowledge, but an effort is made to at least increase the size of the tribe.

The only time when people are absolutely required to document something is when it's a deliverable to a customer...so the customer needs to understand the product we're delivering to them.

We're all supposed to be using an engineering notebook to help document designs...but those really only come into play when someone leaves the company and the company is trying to retain as much IP as possible. Though they are incredible useful on an individual level.

Other than that, it really comes to down to finding time to draw a diagram or do a brain dump into a document describing how something works. Maintaining ICDs (Interface Control Documents) describing software/command protocols or hardware interfaces is pretty easy and provides a lot of information.

My company was paying for the sessions, so I never saw the bill. It also helped that I work for a company large enough to have their own internal executive coaches. However, this particular EC has since left the company to start his own EC consulting business.

I found it very valuable. As with any kind of coaching, you could try to work through issues on your own, but it might take you awhile. With a coach, they're there to call you out when you try making excuses and keep you honest. Also, I found that saying and talking about things out loud has a much bigger impact and weight than just thinking them to yourself.

It also helped that this particular EC had worked for about 10 years as a software engineer at my company. When I described work situations and problems, he understand exactly what I was talking because he understood some of the political dynamics of our company and technical language I was using.

Yes, though it started off with trying to help me figure out how to deal with perfectionism and my relationship with my job.

We eventually got into building people skills. There were active listening skills, some mental models to help find common ground, and we talked about bad assumptions to make versus good assumptions. For example, it's usually good to assume that your co-workers don't have bad intentions.

Are you trying to find out if it was worth it?

Masters. If I got a phd, it wouldn't be in engineering. I thought about an MBA, but I felt I needed to focus on becoming much more technical.

My undergrad is in EE and I'm going back to grad school for embedded systems. Even as a EE, I found myself doing lots of software work - writing little C# apps, C++, data processing code in python, matlib scripts, and once in a blue moon writing firmware for microcontrollers

With embedded systems, I can still use my EE background to get my hands on hardware and I'm learning enough software skills to deliver much more professional software whenever I need to.

As a EE, I knew how to code but never got a lot of formal software training so learning git, focusing on my modular code, etc. has been really nice.

I've got two: buying a house and going back to grad school.

For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though.

Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.

Cost of living is higher and the increase pay doesn't always make up for it...but also keep in mind the non-tangibles. If you move to one of those areas, you're going to surround by some of the top tech talent in the country. That means you're learning, collaborating, competing, and socializing with some of the best peers you could have anywhere. That has a lot of career advantages...mobility, huge potential for upside, exchange of ideas, etc. It also boosts the standards of local universities, schools, etc.

I'm taking a grad school embedded systems class where we have to maintain a makefile that cross compiles to two different embedded platforms as well as compiles on the host machine.

We're doing it by calling a PLATFORM and using an IF statement in the makefile: make PLATFORM=HOST for example. The makefile then replaces the compiler variable, compiler flags, linker, flags, etc.

I want to reach the limit of my potential.

Most of the blogs I read on a regular basis will have an About section or What I'm Reading List. I get most of my book recommendations that way. Some authors will have e-mail lists talking about what they've been reading. Ryan Holiday does this.

Another way is to find an author that you really click with and just read everything that he/she has ever written.

My first senior engineer was a "brilliant" jerk. He had decades of experience, but when I started digging into his work I realized that he was useful mainly because he was offering solutions to problems that he created. I've heard some people say that a good engineer will eliminate the need for his/her own job. This guy was actively creating a need for himself by causing problems without management realizing it.

About 1 out of every 10 ideas was a good idea, but you had to know how to filter out the bad ones. If you said "no" to one of his bad ideas, he'd say that you weren't listening to his input and complain to your manager.

He was abrasive, condescending, and dominated every meeting. If you said anything to management, their response was "Oh that's just Bob, what a crazy, quirky, eccentric guy!" What they refused to realize was that being Bob's peer was very different than working for Bob. What management perceived as a quirk, was a character flaw that made life hell for anyone working underneath Bob.

And to echo other comments, nothing was done about Bob because management didn't want to take responsibility for the culture of the company. Why risk negatively impacting profits by actually managing your employee when you could blame it on millennials being whiny and you believe that engineers are interchangeable?

I didn't interpret that as him saying he was going to do away with regulations and oversight. I read it as him saying he's going to increase tariffs and punish American companies who outsource and try to move operations oversees.

He may do both.